About
I am a historian of Islam and the Middle East, working across the premodern and modern periods. My research examines how religious ideas, ethical practices, and institutions interact with political authority, economic transformation, state formation, and struggles over sovereignty and belonging. Drawing on Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Ottoman Turkish sources, I focus especially on Sufism, Islamic intellectual history, political Islam, colonialism and coloniality, nationalism, and the histories of minoritized communities in Iran, Kurdistan, and the broader Middle East.
My current research develops a political-historical account of the ascetic dimensions of capital accumulation and their relationship to the formation of political Islam. By tracing transformations in religious ideas, ethical practices, and economic life, I examine how the interaction between asceticism and capital accumulation shaped changing relationships among religious authority, state power, and political mobilization in the modern Middle East.
Another major strand of my research explores the development of asceticism and Sufism in medieval Iran, with particular attention to regional traditions, religious networks, intellectual exchange, and the social contexts in which mystical ideas and practices emerged. I also study Yārsān religious history and the place of minoritized religious traditions in the histories of Kurdistan and Iran.
I received my PhD in Iranian Studies from the University of Göttingen, where I specialized in the history of religion. From 2016 to 2024, I taught in the Department of Sociology at Soran University. From 2024 to 2026, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. I am currently a Visiting Scholar in the Southwest Asia and North Africa Program (SWANA) at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University.
I also serve on the Editorial Board of TISHK Magazine and on the Academic Advisory Board of TISHK, Center for Kurdistan Studies.